GAZA (Dispatches) – Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas welcomed a UN report that calls for the immediate ending of the siege the Zionist regime has been imposing on the Gaza Strip since 2007.
On Thursday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report that the situation in the Gaza Strip “is catastrophic” due to a siege that has been imposed on the coastal enclave for 15 years.
“The Israeli siege raised the rates of poverty and unemployment to be the highest in the world, destroyed the economy, crushed a large segment of the Palestinians, and turned them to depend on international aid by more than 50 percent,” the report said.
“The siege of Gaza should be lifted completely in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1860,” OCHA said.
The report called for the immediate lifting of the siege, lifting all restrictions that undermined the Palestinian economy, and reopening and constructing factories destroyed during the conflicts.
Hamas Spokesman in Gaza Abdel Latif al-Qanou called on the international community to work to put an end to the Zionist occupation.
About 2.1 million Palestinians in the besieged enclave are ‘locked in,’ with vast majority of them unable to access the remainder of the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories) and the outside world, the UN report states.
So far in 2022, the Zionist authorities have approved only 64 percent of patients’ requests to exit Gaza mainly for specialized treatment in the nearby Palestinian territory of the West Bank, OCHA said.
“In previous years, patients have died while awaiting a response to their application,” it added.
Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the sliver’s only way of accessing the outside world, “was open for 95 days out of 151 in the first five months of 2022.”
“The volume of truckloads entering Gaza in the first five months of 2022, around 8,000 per month, was about 30% below the monthly average for the first half of 2007, before the blockade. Since then, the population has grown by more than 50%,” OCHA stated.
The Israeli regime has also largely restricted access to areas within 300 meters of the Gaza side of the perimeter fence with the occupied territories, the report said, adding that areas lying several hundred meters beyond are deemed not safe, preventing, or discouraging, agricultural activities.
Zionist troops have also restricted access off Gaza’s coast, currently only allowing fishermen to access 50 percent of the fishing waters allocated for this purpose under the Oslo Accords with the regime.
As a result of the siege, unemployment levels in Gaza are among the highest in the world, the report said, noting that “the Q1 jobless rate in 2022 was 46.6%, compared with an average of 34.8% in 2006.”